tood and openly promised. So, many
times a silence fell upon their casual talk, when the same thing was
in the thought of each.

For miles before they came to it, the sightly Newrich edifice gave
itself, in different aspects, to the view. Mr. Newrich, himself,
never saw anything else in his drives out, of sky, or hill, or
water, after the first glimpse of "my house," and the way it "showed
up" in the approach.

Men were busy wheeling away rubbish, as they drove in between the
great stone posts that marked the entrance, where the elegant,
light-wrought, gilded iron gates were not yet hung.

Other laborers were rolling the lawn and terraces, newly sown with
English grass seed that was to come up in the spring, and begin to
weave its green velvet carpet. Piles of bricks and boards were
gathered at the back of the house and about the stables.

The plate-glass windows glittered in the sun. The tiled-roofs, with
their towers and slopes, looked like those in pictures of palace
buildings. It was a group,--a pile; under these roofs a family of
five--Americans, republicans, with no law of primogeniture to
conserve the estate beyond a single lifetime--were to live like a
little royal household. And the father had made all his money in
fifteen years in Opal Street. This country of ours, and the ways of
it, are certainly pretty nearly the queerest under the sun, when one
looks it all through and thinks it all over.

Frank Sunderline pointed out the lovely work of the pillars in the
porched veranda; every pillar a triple column, of the slenderest
grace, capitaled with separate devices of leaf and flower.

Then they went into the wide, high hall, and through the lower
rooms, floored and ceiled and walled most richly; and up over the
stately staircase, copied from some grand old English architecture;
along the galleries into the wings, where were the sleeping and
dressing-rooms; up-stairs, again, into other sleeping-rooms,--places
for the many servants that there must be,--pressrooms, closets,
trunk-rooms,--space for stowing all the ample providings for use and
change from season to season. Every frame and wainscot and panel a
study of color and exact workmanship and perfect finish.

It was a "show house;" that was just what it was. "And I can't
imagine the least bit of home-iness in the whole of it," said Ray,
coming down from the high cupola whence they had looked far out to
sea, and over inland, upon blue hills and distant